


I'm Still Here

by consideritalljoy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Thrawn - Timothy Zahn
Genre: Academy Era, Angst, Canon Compliant, Eating Disorder, Gen, Mental Illness, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2018-12-20 08:04:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11916672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consideritalljoy/pseuds/consideritalljoy
Summary: AfterAn Illness of the Mind, Eli is alone in his room and has a chance to choose recovery.





	1. I Won't Listen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a direct sequel to An Illness of the Mind, and the first scene takes place a few hours after. I’m not sure how long this will go, and I don’t have much of a plan. I just know what I want to say and I’m going to start saying it. Trigger warnings will be applied as necessary with broad descriptions in the notes up here, and further explanations in the footnotes. 
> 
> Trigger Warning: self-harm

Eli shot up from his desk and, checking one more time behind his shoulder to make sure Thrawn was really gone for another hour, curled up underneath it. 

His skin burned.

Not like the sting of a sunburn, or a even a venomous bite—his left arm burned with an intensity he couldn’t ignore and couldn’t fix. Well. He could. Thrawn didn’t want him too. 

It wasn’t Thrawn’s decision, a voice inside him argued.

Either way, Thrawn was right, he replied. 

The pain in his arm tingled, but each throb shot through him up his shoulder and back down into his chest. He held his left arm out, palm up, and his right hand moved to slide along the inside. His fingertips curved just enough for his nails to scrape as he brought the fingers toward his elbow like a caress. 

For less than a second, the pain in his arm subsided. Of course, it came back with all the same force, and maybe even a little more. His nails stroked his arm again, but harder. 

It still wasn’t enough. 

He knew what he needed. 

His eyes came to rest on Thrawn’s top drawer. They were in there still, probably. He hadn’t seen Thrawn take them out. Of course, the Chiss was clever. He could have taken them out when Eli’s back was turned. Or maybe he’d never put them in there at all and slid them up his sleeve instead. Eli wouldn’t have seen; his head had still been hanging. 

He could always check. 

That was wrong, he argued. He couldn’t just look in Thrawn’s drawer. Besides, he’d notice. Even if Eli were careful, there was too much risk. For all he knew, Thrawn’s memory was photographic or something. 

No, he couldn’t get to the matches. 

The pain in his arm wasn’t gone. It was growing. It was spreading to other parts of his body. Even if Thrawn came back, Eli wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up. His muscles were too tight. 

He had to do something. Eli grunted and forced himself out of the ball he’d curled up into. He used the chair to steady himself as he forced himself back up. He sat back down at his desk as upright as he could bear. 

There had to be something else. 

No, that voice in Eli thought. Don’t. 

Do I have a choice? he argued. 

Yes. You can choose not to do this, came that voice’s reply. 

Both voices were him, of course, which meant he was probably just going crazy. 

Shut up, Eli told both of them. Did that mean there were three voices now? 

His right fingernails scraped along his left arm again, but harder. Faster. More. His skin still burned, but differently. Better. 

More. 

His skin was red and puffy. He couldn’t clearly see his nails anymore because his momentum was still gaining. Parts of the raised pink skin were glowing white as his nails ran over it. Better. 

More. 

Thrawn couldn’t control him. Thrawn didn’t own him. Thrawn didn’t know what the pains were like. 

The white and pink was mixed with liquid red. Eli dug deeper. Scraped harder. He cursed Thrawn as he did. He’d had this under control until now. The pains hadn’t hurt this much. He hadn’t been this frenzied before. The matches made it better. Thrawn took those away. Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he see? 

No, he didn’t. He couldn’t. He hadn’t even known what self-harm was. That perfect, pure, self-righteous alien. 

There, Eli stopped. His fingers froze. For all the things that made Thrawn alien, self-righteousness had never really been one of them. Confidence, sure. Too much at times? Maybe. Ignorance? That’s why Eli was with him at all. 

He really did want to help, though. He’d done a pretty alright job. He didn’t have all the details down maybe, but no one could expect him too, and he’d been clear about it, anyway—he wasn’t planning on being overbearing. This was Eli’s problem, and Thrawn would help where he could, but couldn’t go all the way. Couldn’t make the decisions for him. That was up to Eli. 

Eli looked back down to his left arm and for the first time saw the puffy, bleeding mess it had become. He’d kind of fucked up the first decision. 

With a groan that turned into a sigh, Eli laid his forehead against his desk. With another groan, he lifted it back up and opened the drawer with the bacta patches in it. Wiping away the excess liquid, Eli placed patches on all the worst places and pulled his sleeve back down. He wouldn’t lie to Thrawn, per say, but if Thrawn didn’t notice, Eli certainly wasn’t going to tell him. 

He’d fucked up the first decision, but maybe the patches were the second. He’d done better there. The throbbing in his arm drowned out the urge to dig deeper, but Eli knew it would return in time. It always did. 

Eli had one second after hearing the door creak to reposition himself like everything was fine. Thrawn reentered the room, and Eli got back to studying. 

If the Chiss noticed anything amiss, he didn’t mention it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning Explanations  
> Self-harm: Eli feels an urge to self-harm and ends up scraping his left arm with his right fingernails until they bleed.


	2. Just Whispers and Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extended Note:  
> This fic is going to be different enough from other things I’ve done that I decided you all deserve an explanation of what to expect before we go on. 
> 
> I'm intentionally not planning out the plot of this one as much as I have others. If you know literary terminology, I’m effectively writing veritism. I know and can promise two things about the plot: (1) I am keeping track of what I throw into play and I will definitely be wrapping things up adequately and not just dropping things though I may let them hang for a while, and (2) there will be a hopeful, conclusive ending. 
> 
> I've wanting to do something like this for a while. This story will be a conglomerate of mental illness symptoms and struggles that I personally have experienced or that I have seen others close to me struggle with. As I go on there may also be influences from the classes I'm taking this semester at college; I'm actually taking a psych class called "Counseling" and I'm sure that will bleed into this. 
> 
> Mental illness is a hard thing to describe because it's so unique to each person, and some people haven't had any experience with it at all. If I write on something that is completely nonsensical to you, please know that it is almost certainly the experience of myself or someone I know personally. In that knowledge, if you ask me to explain further in comments, I will almost certainly be glad to do so. If this fic can teach anyone anything about mental illness or if I can learn from it myself, I will be ecstatic, because this material is close to my heart. 
> 
> I'm writing in third person close, meaning we're in Eli's (or in later chapters, Thrawn's) head this whole time even though I'm using third person language. Narrators may be unreliable because people are complex and don’t always perceive things as they are, especially when the subject matter involves mental illness. 
> 
> I value the experiences and differing knowledge bases of others. If you believe I have committed a factual error in any capacity, I absolutely want to hear about it, and I will likely move to fix the issue.
> 
> I’m writing this for my own benefit and if it can prove profitable in any way to any of you, I will be overjoyed. I’m touched and honored if my writing impacts any one of you. 
> 
> Trigger Warning: disassociation, references to self-harm

“Have you begun studying for our exam next week?” Thrawn asked as he entered. 

“Yeah, right. I’m doing the stuff for tomorrow,” Eli answered. At least, he thought he answered. That was him, right? The voice sounded like his, so Eli rolled with it. 

“Is it wise to complete assignments so close to when they are required?” Thrawn asked.

“I mean, not really. It’s what happens. Well, when you’re human, anyway.” The next step was to bend back over the desk and pretending to be at work again, so Eli went through the motions. Where was Eli, anyway? Why wasn’t he here? 

He was here, Eli reminded himself with a quick shake of his head. He was him. Eli Vanto, from Lysatra, stuck here on Coruscant with a real-live Chiss. How could he forget? 

The words morphed together into shapes he didn’t recognize. It was just Basic, he reminded himself, and tried again. The letters looked like Basic. The words didn’t. He couldn’t read it. 

Stay calm, Eli ordered himself. He took the first word letter by letter. When he did that, he could finally read the word. “The.” He tried the next few in a row. Maybe it was alright after all, then. He could read it. He just had to go more slowly than normal.

Except… what was it he’d read? He suddenly couldn’t remember. The words he’d just uncovered were back to being hidden in code that took him minutes to decipher. So what? He’d just have to do it over again.

Eli did. “The.” The next words went about the same. He could see how each letter connected via syllables and roots and prefixes and suffixes to form each word, but not what each word meant without searching his brain for a dictionary definition. 

He could unravel what each word meant, and he could see all the different ways they formed themselves together into grammatically correct sentences, but he couldn’t understand them together. What was going on? 

Eli directed his eyelids to close and reopen twice in quick succession. Eli could read Basic, couldn’t he? Hadn’t he seen Eli do it before? 

He was Eli, he reminded himself. _Eli._ What was the meaning of that word? These other words he could define, at the very least, even if he couldn’t understand them together. “Eli” was just… there. Three letters strung together. Movements of the tongue that other people used to address the entity known as Eli. Who was that entity? What were people really addressing? 

Him. They were addressing him. As Eli’s mind started to wander into semantics, he tried to tie himself back to reality, or at least his textbook. Eli was a human. A particular human. Him. He didn’t need to bother with definitions for people. People had lots of them.

It didn’t make sense. Why address an entity by a name like that? Who had been the first to decide which squiggles looked like each movement of a person’s tongue, anyway? That’s all Basic was. All any language was. And who was the first to decide what tongue movements meant what? Why these ones? Why did everyone go along with it? 

The story wasn’t even particularly well-written. Only, Eli reminded himself once again. It wasn’t a story. This was real life. He was Eli. Basic was Basic. Words were words. He had assignments due in the morning. 

He didn’t want to fuck up Eli’s life any more than Eli already had himself. He refocused his vision on the book. Could he study in Eli’s place? How would that even work? He was Eli. Wasn't he? Did that make any sense?

“Eli, I have come across a punctuation mark I do not understand. Can and may you explain it to me?” Thrawn asked, walking to Eli’s side and dropping a data pad in front of him.

Could he explain it? Probably not, given how he couldn’t even read his own book.

Eli looked down to it. “That’s an asterisk. It means that somewhere later on, like at the end of the document, there’s more explanation that correlates to where the asterisk is. In this case, if you click on it, it shows you a pop-up with the extra information.” How did he know that? 

“Why is this information given in this form rather than as a part of the whole?” Thrawn asked. 

“Because the information may be less important, or may be helpful for understanding what the concept it’s explaining is saying and doesn’t have much meaning on its own. And probably other things. Those are just the ones that come to mind.” Eli’s voice echoed in his ears. He was getting his information from somewhere. Where, he couldn’t tell. 

Thrawn seemed satisfied, though his gaze lingered on Eli’s left arm a second longer than Eli would have liked. “Thank you,” he said after a moment's thoughtful hesitation, and left Eli’s desk. 

Eli would have screamed if he hadn’t known how many people would have heard him, especially Thrawn. As it was, he stayed completely still. Beneath his sleeve, his arm burned. It was a good burn. The pain of the cuts he’d given himself were much better than the pain of wanting to make them. 

Focusing his energy on paying attention to the throb of his arm, Eli absorbed as much of the burning sensation as he could. It almost started to calm him down. He must be Eli if he could feel Eli’s injuries. 

This wasn’t too unusual, he told himself. He’d felt like this before. In the end it always turned out that everything was fine and he was Eli and the words made sense again until the next time. Why was it that whenever this happened and he couldn’t even think, he could still talk so normally to Thrawn? 

It probably meant he was faking it. 

Of course, he was Eli. Of course, he could read Basic. Simple. He looked back down at the book, intent on proving that he was just procrastinating all along.

Unfortunately, the words were still unintelligible. How committed was he to faking it? Eli felt disgusted with himself for the laziness. 

Something snapped. He didn’t think he cared. 

Thrawn wanted him to get better, but “better” was a meaningless, undefined term anyway. Eli was too far gone to get “better,” and really, did it even matter? He wouldn’t have gotten this way in the first place if he’d just stuck to supply. 

Eli stared into space with eyes that glazed over. The lack of any feeling at all felt like a welcome release from the floods he’d experienced recently. What harm was there in waiting this mood out? With any luck, it would never end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning Explanations  
> Disassociation: Eli disassociates in a slightly abnormal way (to my knowledge)—not only does he feel like an entity other than "Eli," but he also ceases to comprehend language, though he can still help Thrawn with his Basic. If anyone can identify not being able to comprehend language like this and peg it to something more specific, I'd love to hear it, because the closest I've ever come to seeing an explanation for this experience has been disassociation, hence what I'm calling it here.  
> Self-harm: Eli calms himself down by focusing on the pain he inflicted on himself in the last chapter.


	3. What Would You Ever Say

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Chapter occurs simultaneously with Chapter 2._

_It is possible to order a behavioral change. It is not possible to order a cognitive one._

_His heat signature is markedly raised and focused around his left arm. He moves in tight movements. His words and actions feature abnormal pauses. His tone is intentionally measured despite the appearance of normalcy._ Eli was hiding something. 

From the moment he reentered the room, Thrawn knew Eli was unwell. His roommate changed mood frequently and, as far as Thrawn had been able to tell as of yet, with little to no pattern. The lack of pattern interested Thrawn. There were always patterns. 

The first thing Thrawn focused on was the heat. His infrared vision allowed him to see heat signatures, and Eli did usually glow faintly with his internal body temperature. However, the glow was usually faint, and spread evenly throughout his body.

Something had happened while he was gone, and given the subject of their last real discussion, was likely not to Eli’s benefit. 

There was no smoke in the air as in previous times. He took an item of little consequence from his top drawer, checking discreetly to see if the matches were were he left them. They were. Even so, when Eli left the room next, Thrawn would move them to the bottom of his second drawer. Eli would be clever enough to find them if he wished, but not on a whim, and that was the objective. 

Thrawn would move the matches, but they didn’t seem to be relevant to the present moment. The added heat signature had come from somewhere, and it likely meant that Eli required assistance. 

As a way of gathering more information, Thrawn asked Eli a minute question about Basic. Eli had answered in a way that was almost entirely normal. Almost. Thrawn couldn’t entirely place the difference in his eyes, but he’d been with the human long enough to know that his eyes changed based on emotion, and that they didn’t usually look like that. The glint didn’t seem as real. 

Regardless, Eli was attempting to study, and Thrawn chose not to interrupt again. This illness which he continued to learn of would require strategy to defeat. At times, that strategy would no doubt call for immediate action, but at others, it would require discretion. Eli’s performance at the academy would greatly influence the illness, and so was itself a piece of strategy. 

Thrawn continued his own study for many hours, passively observing his roommate as he did. Once, Eli straightened his back and a hard look passed his face. It was followed by a grim expression and a strangely different glint than Thrawn was used to seeing in his eyes. The eyes, subtle nose flair, and hard lip line all led to the conclusion that Eli had decided something, and that whatever it was, it was likely not in his best interest. 

Thrawn gathered the words of an interruption, but Eli abruptly shifted back to studying. His back was to Thrawn and he likely was not looking to be spoken to on the subject of his health again; at least, not so quickly. He would take a more passive approach. 

“Cadet Vanto, are you well?” Thrawn asked. 

Eli leaned his torso to the side as an indication that he had heard the question, and took a few seconds to complete the paragraph he was reading before answering. “Yeah,” he said. He offered no other information. 

“There are multiple factors that would suggest this is not the case,” Thrawn pressed. 

The eye roll was audible in Eli’s voice even though they had not established eye contact. “And just what factors are you talking about?” 

“Your tone and posture indicates that you are self-aware or your own mannerisms, and the slight emphasis you put on each component suggests that you are modifying your behaviors to conceal their truth,” Thrawn explained. “Perhaps more prominent than these factors is the extreme change in your heat signature, particularly that of your left arm.” 

To that, Eli stiffened. “Not this again,” he said. 

“Not what?” Thrawn asked. 

“You. This,” Eli trailed off, gesturing vaguely to the space between them. “Would you give it a rest for a while? I didn’t tell you about all that stuff just so you could take over my life in yet another way.” 

_His tone indicates irritation and a lack of openness. He wishes to be left alone. He is definitely unwell._ “I would counsel you not to injure yourself and remind you that you are free to speak to me on this and any subject at any time you require.”

“Yeah, thanks, great.” Eli tilted his head back to his book, signaling that the discussion was over. 

Eli’s decisions in this area were his own to make, and so Thrawn turned back to his own studies as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's good to be writing for this fandom again, even if this chapter is short. With any luck, more will follow. :)


End file.
